"We need to get to the bottom of it"

At some point in most one rows, one of you says this, and it sounds like the mature view. Stop fighting about the dishwasher and find out what's really going on. The trouble is what the sentence assumes. It assumes the underneath is deep, and single, and hidden, so that getting to it means digging, probably at length, probably late, and probably through some old material that neither of you wants to handle. Which is why you don't do it and go back to the dishwasher.

Keith Sanford asked married people, in two studies, twelve hundred and then twenty-three hundred of them, to think of a specific row and rate a long list of words for how they'd felt and how they'd seen their partner during it. Two things came out, over and over, in every group he checked. He called them perceived threat and perceived neglect. Perceived threat is the feeling that your partner is blaming you and trying to control you. Perceived neglect is the feeling that your partner isn't putting in what they should, isn't contributing, isn't investing in the two of you. Each one came with its own set of emotions and its own reading of the other person, and each one went with how satisfied people were and how they handled conflict.

I'll use plainer words for the rest of the book. Being blamed, and being left to it. And here's what I'd take from Sanford's finding. The underneath isn't deep. It isn't some buried thing that needs an evening and a bottle of wine to reach. It's one of two ordinary worries that most people who live together have, and it's sitting right there in the first sentence of the instance, said in the wrong words. "You didn't empty it, then" is "I feel like I'm doing this on my own", said as a dishwasher. "I do it more than you do" is "I feel like I can't do anything right", said as a dishwasher. Neither of you needs to dig. You need to translate.

That's the change this chapter is for. Getting to the bottom of it isn't an excavation. It's noticing which of two worries you were in when the sentence came out, and chapter 20 will ask you to name it. The bottom is about four inches down, and it's the same bottom every time, and once you've seen it you'll see it in every costume.